A successful bricks-and-mortar family business growing in size and ambition was gearing up to tackle e-commerce and digital marketing in a serious way. The directors understood that a critical preliminary step was defining a brand tone of voice. With potentially many content creators working together to push the brand on digital channels, they instinctively knew that inconsistency of voice would not serve them well as they attempted to build trust as an online retailer.
We gathered together customer-facing staff members as well as the founder and the current directors and managers. We looked at what the company said or believed about itself – its vision, mission and values – and at what its customers value about the way it does things. We talked about the importance of the voice of the founder of the business, who was still very much part of the operation and is seen as a figurehead. The business had a successful loyalty programme – a brand in itself – and we analysed its brand traits.
Away from the workshop, I conducted desk research on the way the business was already communicating and compared it with competitors. I translated elements of the vision, mission and values into tone. I looked at how the sector communicates and at how my client could differentiate itself by way of tone of voice.
The output was a distinctive tone of voice for my client made up of was several brand traits. The tone of voice has been shared with anyone involved in marketing the business and has given the content creators confidence that they can speak for the brand in a consistent way.
“We now have a distinct, defined tone of voice for our business. This was a critical piece of work at that point in our history as we moved to step up our comms strategy to fully embrace digital marketing. Eilish continues to support us by policing our comms to make sure we stay true to our tone of voice.”
